


this world is not made for you (run boy run)

by HearJessRoar



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: As One Does, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Loneliness, M/M, coping with your soul being smacked out of your body at 40 mph in 1987, he's dead guys i know you're shocked, willie centric fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:08:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27168400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HearJessRoar/pseuds/HearJessRoar
Summary: even his mother had called him recklessand he might have been, but never with his heartwillie's been around awhile, and time doesn't mean much anymoreuntil it does
Relationships: Alex/Willie (Julie and The Phantoms)
Comments: 57
Kudos: 374





	this world is not made for you (run boy run)

The thing about dying is that he hadn't known it was happening.

People gasped and screamed and cars honked and there were squealing tires but-

He hadn't felt it.

Not really.

Felt the grill of the truck, sure. And for the rest of his afterlife, he'd have a permanent bruise across his back in the shape of a brand new 1988 Chevy Silverado's headlight.

But the part where his brain had bled out in the street, well.

Willie hadn't felt a thing.

One moment he'd been rolling along the boulevard, living high and his Walkman blaring, headphones hung lazily around his neck.

The next, he'd swerved into the street to avoid a harried woman with a stroller.

He hadn't even thought twice about it.

And the moment after that?

Chaos.

On some level, Willie had known that the thing everyone was screaming about was him, his body, lying in the street, his own familiar hair tangled and sticky in a pool of red red blood.

But Willie wasn't _in it_ anymore.

He realized later that he'd probably been in shock.

But in the moment, he'd picked up his board, untangled his headphones, and walked away.

Walked away from his own dead body.

There's no instruction manual for death, and Willie wasn't the type of guy who would read it even if there was one.

So he did what he’d done his whole life, and skated on.

It wasn’t so bad, being dead. He could skate where he wanted, he could do what he wanted.

He could stare at anyone he wanted.

And maybe it was a little lonely, he’d admit to himself in the dead of night when the world was asleep and he had nothing but the scrape of his wheels to keep him company. But it wasn’t like he hadn’t been lonely in life.

Kids had a way of noticing there was something...different. About Willie. When he’d been alive. Nobody had ever been outright cruel to him, but throughout high school he always felt like he was getting invited with the group out of obligation. Like nobody could think of a valid reason _not_ to invite him, but if they could get away with forgetting him then they would.

And the afterlife wasn’t much different.

Other ghosts didn’t seem to notice one way or another whether he was around or not. And the feeling was kind of mutual. Death had exacerbated his worst quality; his apathy.

Willie just.

Didn’t care that much.

And he had never tried to convince himself that he didn’t know why some people were so uneasy around him. He had known since his mom took him to see the Karate Kid in 1984, when he’d been fourteen years old and couldn’t stop staring at Ralph Macchio’s mouth.

The end of the 80s came and went and Willie kept moving forward.

The 90s arrived with a bang, a dusty toil of flannels and grunge and torn jeans that had been a long time coming even when he’d been alive. He moved up to Seattle for a few years to watch the scene grow, came home when he got bored of watching the umpteenth garage band try to sound like Kurt Cobain.

In the sunny city of angels (and ghosts. So many ghosts) there hadn’t been a shortage of teenage boys trying their damndest to be the next big thing. He watched so many of them flicker out, their passion never burning bright enough for more than a jam session or two.

Sunset Curve was different.

He hadn’t meant to eavesdrop, but when he’d been sliding on through the neighborhood and felt the bass reverb in his bones so strongly that he was nearly knocked to the pavement, he knew he’d have to take a look. There weren’t many things that could affect him after death, and to be so blindsided by it out of nowhere was a new phenomenon.

Ghosts don’t have much of a sense of boundaries when it came to the living, and Willie was never any sort of exception. He knew they couldn’t see him.

And they were good.

Really good.

He learned their name from the tapestry hanging behind the drummer, listened in on a few songs, and thought about taking one of their demo cds from the box in the corner.

But his Walkman had gotten misplaced years ago, and it had been a tape player anyway, so he left the cds where they were, snagged a tee shirt from another box on the way out, and moved on.

Sometimes when he got bored, he’d swing through the neighborhood, see if they were playing. Nine times out of ten, they were. He’d catch himself humming along, shifting on his board to the beat. If he was feeling especially bold, he’d walk right in to watch them practice for a few minutes.

Skating forever was rad, but being able to stare at boys for as long as he wanted was the best part of being dead.

And these were sweaty sweaty musician boys with nice hair.

Was it creepy? Probably. Did Willie care? Not at all.

He remembered the weird way his dead heart had thumped when he’d seen how comfortable they all were with each other. Their lead singer would hang all over all of them, like he didn’t give a crap about anyone seeing him embracing his friends.

Nobody had ever just casually thrown their arm around Willie’s shoulders like that, nobody ever slung a side hug around his hips the way the bassist was doing while he teased their flustered drummer.

And it hurt.

Willie stopped coming by, and he skated on.

He started experimenting with his own powers, after not realizing he’d had them the whole time. Turned out that he and vehicles had reached an understanding after his death. 

In spite of that, he made himself a hard and fast rule for messing with them.

Parked cars were fair game; moving cars were off limits.

He might not have remembered _-cold stunned gritty road shrapnel in his cheek-_ his death, but that didn't mean he wanted to be the cause of someone else's.

Under the cover of night he would fiddle with the electronics under the dashboards of old cars.

Old was relative; most of them had been familiar models to him growing up.

And he lost time that way, stuck in the curiosity of the limits of his power and how he could fix the problem of a short circuit in a radio or a crappy starter for a stranger who probably needed a pick-me-up.

It was as close to caring about other people as he could get.

And so it went, time beginning to mean nothing, one day at a time flying by as fast as the wind whipping through his hair on the Santa Monica pier.

_-went to see his mom once, just once, but the less said about that the better, the haunted gaunt look on her face while she sat on his dusty bed and looked right through him-_

He was stopped short a few months (or had it been years already?) later, staring up at the marquee of the Orpheum, proclaiming a familiar name being showcased, and couldn’t help the grin on his face.

Obviously being a sold out show wasn’t going to be an obstacle for him, but he hadn’t been to a real concert in years. It felt right to wait in line with the rest of Sunset Curve’s fanbase. So he had, and listened to the sound check with a pair of giddy girls at the back of the line who couldn’t see him.

They got tee shirts, and he didn’t, but that was okay because he already had one.

And if he stared too long at the drummer’s shoulders as he and his friends walked away to do whatever it was they had to do before their performance, well then that was Willie’s business.

…

_lights and the frantic, unrelenting blare-_

He'd looked for them, After.

After the ambulance had pulled away, lights off, with the sinking feeling in his dead chest.

They had been so young.

So had he.

And Willie skated on.

He met Caleb in the winter of 2002, except he hadn't, and he hadn't even realized it was actually 2005.

Time kept slipping him by.

Caleb had offered safety, the promise of no more lost time, a place to belong, where people would care that he was present.

And by God if Willie wasn't lonely enough to take him up on it. The club was a sanctuary, where lifers smiled at him the way his mom never could again and the showgirls doted on him like mother hens backstage and time stayed where it was supposed to and all it cost him was one little stamp and his undying loyalty.

And he didn’t regret it until the very second he'd tried to skate through an oddly familiar set of shoulders.

Alex was...

Christ, Alex was _beautiful_ and Willie couldn't stop looking at him.

And Alex was _looking back at him_ , like he _mattered_ , like he cared if Willie was around.

He hadn't ever been good with faces, and with twenty five years dead and gone between then and now, he didn't place Sunset Curve until Alex had introduced him to Reggie and Luke.

By then, there had been no good time to say _hey I was there the night you died_.

And then Caleb had tried to claim their souls.

And Willie skated away, assuming in his rotten, broken heart that no matter the outcome of the night, he was never going to see his beautiful drummer boy again.

_and he didn't care no no he didn't, his soul wasn't being shredded under his wheels it was just the fear of what Caleb was gonna do to him, Alex I'm so sorry-_

Julie had meant a lot to Alex, Willie justified to himself when he found himself cruising through her neighborhood at seven pm on a Thursday, some weeks later.

_(he was losing time again oh god)_

He just wanted to see how the poor girl was faring after all her losses, maybe try to offer some ghostly comfort.

The fact he knew Alex had been keeping a hoodie in her loft and that he wanted it right now _right now_ was irrelevant.

Caleb had been in a perpetual bad mood since they slipped through his grasp, and Willie knew he was just biding his time in punishing Willie for his part in the plot and total betrayal.

The years-old stamp on his wrist kept burning.

A warning.

A literal slap on the wrist, if he wanted.

He expected a dark studio when he'd peered through the window, an empty shell for him to sneak through, grab a small reminder of the boy he had hurt so badly, and get the hell out before taking a quick check in with that magical lifer but-

This.

He had not expected this.

He was there and he was whole and he looked _miserable_ , sprawled chest down across Julie's lap while that complete _angel_ of a girl ran her fingers over Alex's back in soothing little shapes that Willie remembered his mother tracing into his shoulders once, a whole life-death-time ago.

_Julie can touch them-_

His brain filled with static.

Something dripped off his chin and when he lifted his hand, Willie was stunned to see tears on his fingertips, tears trailing steadily down his face.

Caring hurt _so much_ and by God all he wanted was to be the one drawing stars into Alex’s shoulderblades.

And for the first time in his afterlife, Willie didn't run away.

He took a breath he didn't even need anymore, raised his hand, and rapped on the garage window.

**Author's Note:**

> idk i just think willie's neat and he strikes me as someone who chooses very carefully who he cares about, esp since if hes from the late 80s like i think he is, it would have been hard for him to be close to anyone in life, maybe more so after death
> 
> someone made a tumblr post about how interesting it would be if willie had known sunset curve before their deaths and unfortunately i cannot find the post either due to my own crappy tagging or tumblr being tumblr so anyway if that was u ur brilliant god bless ya thanks for sparking part of the idea for this
> 
> pls comment i just crave validation


End file.
